Planning a holiday can be hard; do you start with an activity, a place, something from your bucket list or just randomly stick a pin in the map? When I need inspiration I like using maps!

On Hayes and Jarvis we’ve had detailed Google maps that you can interact with for a while. It is great seeing where your hotel is compared to the sights you want to visit. One thing has always been missing though, a nice simple map of the world to kick off the whole process.

I am not a developer but I do enjoy dabbling with HTML and CSS to get cool things live without being tied to a release schedule. On Wednesday I took a look at how our competitors display maps, an hour later I had a working prototype on my laptop. I am lucky to work with some great designers and on this occasion Darren was on hand to create a map in brand colours and advise on the finished look.

We battled a bit with positioning the labels but got a finished version ready for sign-off in some downtime after a meeting. This morning we went back and added some nice hover effects to let the user know they can interact with the labels – again this involved a battle with CSS but we did it!

We put the final map live on the site on Friday, less than two working days after we decided to do it. The map is hooked up with proper tracking so we’ll be able to see if people use it. All in all it has been a very satisfying mini-project to work on.